Naked

by Kevin Brooks

  He was a rock ’n’ roll star.

  In 1981, he left London and moved to Los Angeles, hoping to break into films. He appeared in a few, none of which were any good – and even if they had been any good, it was generally agreed that Curtis wasn’t – and in 1982 he announced that he was giving up acting to concentrate on music again. A new record was in the pipeline, a triple album this time … but then the rumours started again. Curtis was drunk all the time, he was back on heroin, hooked on cocaine … he’d beaten up one of his girlfriends, he was out of control, going crazy … he’d given away all his money and was living on the streets …

  I don’t know how much of this was true.

  All I know for sure is that on New Year’s Day, 1983, his body was discovered in a cheap motel room in downtown Los Angeles. He’d died from a massive heroin overdose.

  The absence of a suicide note has fuelled endless speculation about Curtis’s death over the years, and there have been countless conspiracy theories suggesting that it wasn’t suicide, that it was an accidental overdose, or that he was murdered – by an ex-girlfriend, or the FBI, or the mafia …

  I don’t know if Curtis killed himself or not. But whatever it was – suicide or accident – it was always going to happen.

  It was just a matter of when.

  So I can’t say that I was surprised when I heard about it … I was distraught, and stunned, shocked and confused, and I cried my heart out for a long, long time … but, no, I wasn’t surprised.

  He was Curtis Ray …

  Fucked up and dead at every moon.

  Life and death …

  I don’t know …

  It’s always really hard.

  But you can’t have one without the other, can you?

  And, in a way, that’s what this is all about. I can tell this story now because Nancy is dead, and Little Joe has a new life on the other side of the world, so I don’t have to worry about risking their lives by revealing their secrets, because those secrets can’t hurt them any more.

  In the days and weeks after William’s death, I was in such a state – both physically and emotionally – that it never even occurred to me that some of the things I was feeling might not have anything to do with my grief. The tiredness, the nausea … I didn’t actually assume that it was all part of the grieving process, because at that time I simply wasn’t capable of rational thought. It was just stuff that was happening to me, no different to all the other stuff … in fact, I barely even noticed it.

  By early October though, after a solid week of being sick every morning, it finally dawned on me that perhaps there was something else going on. So I went to the doctor’s for a test (this was before home pregnancy tests were available in shops), and within a few days it was confirmed – I was pregnant.

  I was going to have a baby …

  I didn’t know what to think. Part of me was thrilled, elated, joyous … another part was scared, confused, unable to cope. I was still grieving for William, I was still in mourning, I was still consumed by his death … how could I now celebrate a life? And I was still only seventeen, I was still at school …

  I didn’t know what to do.

  I just didn’t know …

  The only thing I was sure about was that William was the father.

  I just knew it.

  I could feel it.

  There was absolutely no doubt in my mind.

  And, besides, the timing was right … and whenever I’d slept with Curtis, we’d always taken precautions. But that night with William in the chapel … that was different. That was the night …

  I knew it.

  And even if there had been even the slightest doubt in my mind – which, to be perfectly honest, there probably was – when my baby was born, on 12 June 1977, and I held him in my arms for the first time and gazed into his eyes, I knew – without question – that he was William’s son.

  Our son.

  His eyes were blue, of course – and they didn’t become hazel until he was about eighteen months old – but they were undeniably William’s eyes. Pure, bright, clear and radiant, so full of life …

  Everything about him was just like William.

  He was William.

  He is William.

  William Garcia.

  There was no other name for him really.

  He’s thirty-four now, which I still find incredibly hard to believe, especially when it comes back to me that his father will always be sixteen years old. It’s just so strange sometimes, knowing that my son is more than twice as old as his father … it makes me quite sad when I think about it.

  But it can be very comforting too.

  William is very much like his father, in all kinds of ways. He has the same eyes, the same hair, the same beautiful face … he thinks in a very similar way, he even sounds like his father, especially when he sings. And, just like his father, he’s a naturally gifted musician. He’s always loved music, ever since he was young, and as well as inheriting his father’s musical ability, he also inherited William’s attitude towards music. I’ve never forgotten the time when William was talking to me about Curtis’s ‘empty dream’, and he told me that ‘if music was really all he cared about, he wouldn’t give a shit about getting a record deal and “making it big” and all that kind of crap … he’d just want to play.’ And I know that he’d be proud of his son, because that’s exactly how he’s always felt about music. He just wants to write songs and play them. And that’s pretty much all he’s done all his life – write and play. He’s done it on his own, in bands, for money, for nothing … he’s never really cared if he makes a living from it or not. As long as he can play, he’s happy.

  He actually does make a living from his music now – in fact, he makes more than just a living from it – and although that means I don’t get to see him as much as I’d like to, it also means that whenever I want to hear his voice, wherever I am, all I have to do is turn on my iPod and listen to his songs. And the most wonderful thing about that is that when I go to Abney Park Cemetery, which I do at least once a week, and I walk the pathways, soaking up the memories of William, and I sit on our bench, looking around at the trees and the statues and the great masses of tangled vegetation still growing wild over the ancient gravestones and tombs … I can, if I want to, listen to our son’s music and imagine that William is listening with me.

  40

  I got an email from my son this morning. He’s on tour in America at the moment, promoting his latest album, but he always keeps in touch with me, wherever he is – he’ll phone or text or email me every day, just to let me know that he’s OK. This morning, though, his email said simply, It’s about time you watched this, Mum. There was an attachment with the email, a video … totp/23976/Naked/Naked.

  It was a video of our performance on Top of the Pops.

  I’d never seen it. For a long time, I wasn’t even aware that the recording still existed – and even if I had known, I wouldn’t have wanted to watch it – but I’ve known for a few years now that you can see a lot of the old Top of the Pops performances on YouTube, and that UK Gold has a lot of the shows too. So I guessed that if I’d really wanted to see our performance, I probably could have.

  I just didn’t want to.

  But now …

  Well, now that I’ve written this, now that I’ve gone back to those days and lived them again … it feels as if I’ve exorcised something. I know that I can go back there now, if I want to … I know that it doesn’t hurt me too much any more. And when I read William’s email this morning, and I realized that he’d sent me the Top of the Pops video … I knew that he was right.

  It was about time I watched it.

  So I did.

  My heart was beating really hard as I downloaded the video and set it up to play. I was incredibly nervous, anxious … even a little bit scared. But I was excited too, in a scary kind of way. And when the
video started to play … God, it was just so weird. It began right at the end of the Wurzels performance, the camera panning across the applauding audience to focus on Tony Blackburn, grinning his grin, dressed in his awful cream suit, flirting like an idiot with two teenage girls dressed in short skirts and tight tank tops … and then he turns back to the camera and says, ‘Once again it’s tip for the top time on Top of the Pops, and here’s a brand-new group with a brand-new song … it’s Naked …’ He pauses, grinning again. ‘… with “Naked”.’

  As the camera pans back across the audience again we hear the opening four bars of ‘Naked’, and then we see Curtis – almost bent double over his guitar, hammering out the chords – and then the bass and drums come storming in, and God … I’d forgotten how good it sounds. Big and loud, stunningly powerful … and now Curtis is lurching up to the microphone, staggering and twisting all over the place, and he glares like a lunatic into the camera and opens his mouth and starts to sing:

  IDLE BLACK EYES

  AND DRUG-YELLOWED SKIN

  THE DREAM FLOWERS DIE

  ON HER COLD NAKED SIN …

  He’s miming, of course, but it doesn’t really matter – it sounds fantastic, and he looks really good … and then the camera focuses on me …

  And I look like hell.

  I’m dressed all in black – tight black jeans, tight black vest – and my face is deathly white, and I look as if I’m in a trance. My hands are moving on the bass, but everything else is still. I’m just standing there, staring at nothing. My eyes are empty, my face is blank … I’m dead to the world. I don’t even react when the camera pans down from my face to leer at my breasts for a few moments, I just keep staring straight ahead, staring into the void …

  I’M NAKED!

  YOU’RE NAKED!

  It’s a really odd feeling, seeing myself on the screen. I can see how I would have looked to others back then – I would have looked good, in an elegantly wasted kind of way … I would have looked cool, like I didn’t care … I would have looked rock ’n’ roll.

  But I wasn’t.

  I was simply in shock.

  WE’RE NAKED!

  … NAKED!

  The oddest thing about watching the video though – but also, for me, the most touching thing – is that although William isn’t actually there on stage with us, you can see, quite clearly, where he would have been if he had been there. There’s a clearly visible gap on stage, just to the right of Curtis, where William always stood, and whether or not Curtis is consciously avoiding that gap … I don’t know.

  But he doesn’t go there.

  Not once.

  It’s as if there’s something there, something in the way.

  And the more I watch the video – and I’ve seen it quite a few times now – the more I’m convinced that there is something there …

  An energy, perhaps …

  A force.

  A spirit.

  And, of course, I know that’s ridiculous. I know it’s not William …

  But the last time I watched the video, no more than five minutes ago, I could have sworn that just for a moment I saw the ghost of a face looking back at me – a pale complexion, a beautiful smile, a pair of bright hazel eyes …

  And just for a moment, I cried.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  penguin.com

  First published 2011

  Text copyright © Kevin Brooks, 2011

  Cover design by James Fraser

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978–0–141–96937–4